People are fungible

If you want wise words about this latest Cabinet reshuffle, I offer you Donald Rumsfeld:

People are fungible. You can have them here or there.

This corrects the myth surrounding this, and all previous reshuffles - that it’s sufficient to have talented people in the right jobs trying their utmost.
Such a view mistakes a difficult job for an impossible one. If a job’s difficult, we want a skilled person to try hard at it. But ministerial jobs - insofar as they are aimed at changing society unequivocally for the better - are not difficult, but impossible. 
It’s just impossible for any central agency to gather enough information about a vast area - health, education, social security - to manage it well. The best a new minister can hope for is that he’s lucky enough to move on before management failures become clear.
The solution here is not to find the best brains, because even these are inadequate. Instead, it is to find the best mechanisms for doing without brains. As Alfred North Whitehead said:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

This was, of course, Hayek’s great insight - that the value of markets is that they economize on knowledge and rationality.
This, though, is lost upon politicians and those who report upon them. They continually believe the crassest form of the fundamental attribution error, that political success requires no more than having good people in the right jobs.
How much evidence do we need before realizing that this is stupid?

Comments

[Mark Wadsworth]

Excellent broadside. Do you favour "small government"?

[dearieme]

There may be two cases for having someone in office who is intelligent, well-informed and capable of good judgement. (1) He might avoid superblunders (Iraq, for example). (2) He might, and this is a long shot, realise his limitations and try to delegate/devolve/denationalise, or whatever. Otherwise, I pretty much agree with your points.

[sanbikinoraion]

What dearime said.

[Meh]

Someone needs to be contrarian. You're guilty of your own attribution error Chris. I realise it satisfies some obscure need in your ego to totally discount agency effects, but in fact the evidence doesn't seem to be on your side.

You have some good stuff to say, but you'll be much more convincing when you don't overplay your hand.

[Meh]

A catchy slogan for Chris' views came to mind "Managerialism through the Market." He doesn't really believe in any expertise, despite all his waffle about "leaving skilled employees to do their job" he doesn't actually believe there is any such thing as skill...

Now, no doubt he'll protest that diagnosing an economy is harder than diagnosing an illness in a human being, but that just reveals how profoundly he misunderstands the nature of both processes.

[Laban Tall]

"The solution here is not to find the best brains, because even these are inadequate. Instead, it is to find the best mechanisms for doing without brains."

"All the senior officers of the German Army were taught a uniform system of military science. This was the legacy of the elder Moltke, who reasoned that since for a country to be endowed with a military leader of genius was a matter of luck, and that the fate of a nation should not be allowed to depend upon chance, therefore by the application of military science it must be made possible for even mediocre men to put strategic concepts successfully into effect."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914

[Peter]

The talent needed is a talent for management, not for managerialism. And the skills come from realising that you have to be self-critical and address the improvements needed in your own performance. True management delegates while guiding - and indeed you end up using skilled and brainy people who may well rise to challenge your own position. May the best person win.

[Dander]

I couldn't hear Gordon witter on about doing his 'outmost' without my heart sinking. Chris is surely right in broad terms. But...

(i) Just coz you can't solve the big problems doesn't mean you can't make things a lot worse. There are asymmetries here.

(ii) Gordon is earnest and thinks sober conviction will do the job. Tony thought being passionate made all the difference. At least we're through with that charade.